Early in my career I spent a lot of time in a consultancy focusing on delivering business intelligence solutions for customers. This was a period with a lot of change in the BI market (early 2010s for those at home) and while tools were becoming much more capable and much easier for users to self-serve, not everything was great.
These tools frequently made content discovery and reuse difficult, leading to proliferation of orphaned and unmaintained dashboards. They also tended to lock up business logic inside of proprietary file formats that couldn’t be subjected to normal version control systems. Running a quick diff to figure out what had changed between versions was impossible. Solving this sprawl of business logic, or semantics, between different versions of dashboards within a Business Intelligence platform (BI), multiplied by the fact that many organizations have several BI platforms is one of the main challenges Cube was built to solve.
But, what about the other part of this situation? How about the problem of BI dashboards with proprietary binary formats that can’t be version controlled? Well, for that you probably want a tool that operates with a BI-as-code model. It’d sure be great if it had excellent developer resources with guides on how to perform code reviews with integration of git-based workflows. Even better if it had support for a CLI and continuous integration patterns.
Forgive me taking forever to get to the point, but if you’ve encountered these challenges with BI tools, you should check out our newest technology integration - Hashboard, for your business intelligence needs. As someone who came to BI all those years ago from a developer background, I am super excited about this partnership!
Hashboard is now compatible with Cube Cloud as a data source and the two products integrate together well. Pairing a semantic layer with Hashboard is a natural fit. We share many common ideas about managing analytics at scale, such as the power of metrics and the importance of analytics objects being code that is easy to version control and reason about.
Hashboard is delivered as a cloud service with a generous free trial sign up. If you want to take it for a spin, create a free account and connect to Cube via the SQL-API. You can find detailed steps in our documentation.
Teams can work together and define their key business metrics at an organizational level inside of Cube using our code-based data modeling, ensuring metric consistency across Hashboard and outside tools. These governed models and metrics are then easily explorable and understandable within Hashboards beautiful and smart visualization experience which provides sensible defaults and robust data profiling capabilities. These features help users more quickly orient themselves and get the answers they need. This also helps to prevent the dreaded “blank page” problem that users face in more overwhelming visualization interfaces. Hashboards' opinionated approach to dashboarding helps you get to answers faster, while keeping things looking great and adhering to visualization best practices.
If you want to learn more about how Hashboard and Cube join forces as a modern, developer-friendly analytics stack, check out our webinar featuring Carlos Aguilar of Hashboard: Build an Explorable and Accessible Semantic Layer with Cube and Hashboard. You can also reach out to me in any of the usual places, or contact your account executive at Cube.